ARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE: KENGO KUMA, … · Juhani Pallasmaa, whereas the architectural actualization of the given concept was analysed on ... Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma,

FACTA UNIVERSITATIS Series: Architecture and Civil Engineering Vol 13, No 3, 2015, pp. 245 - 256 DOI: 10.2298/FUACE1503245V

ARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE:

KENGO KUMA, JEAN NOUVEL, AND THE AMBIVALENCE

OF MATERIAL EXPERIENCE

UDC 712

Ana Vignjevic*

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture, Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract. This paper examines the contemporary conceptual, perceptive and aesthetic

potential of architecture to transform into landscape by means of materialization.

Contrary to the former, modernistic principles of transparency, which eliminated the

wall between the internal and external space on a literal, visual level, contemporary

social and visual context create the prerequisites for establishing a new, ambivalent

treatment of (de)materialization of the border between architecture and the landscape.

Such transformation was interpreted in the paper as a consequence of the general

change related to determination of architectural form, as well as change in the sphere of

theory of perception. The ambivalent relation on the line subject-architecture-landscape

relies in the paper on the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and

Juhani Pallasmaa, whereas the architectural actualization of the given concept was

analysed on the example of two different authors’ views - Kengo Kuma and Jean Nouvel.

The emphasis on architectural experience, rather than on the architectural image, places

the material in the domain of the main framework of this concept, whether based on its

tactile (Kuma) or imaginary value (Nouvel). Finally, in order to make architectural

materiality a part of the natural environment, both design methods paradoxically shift the

materials from their natural context (truth to materials), whereby, consequently, except

for materiality, the perceptive experience of the place itself is relativized.

Key words: architecture, landscape, Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, materiality, ambivalence

1. INTRODUCTION

The last two decades of the 20th

century signified the beginning of a design process of

surpassing all traditional, formally established architectural frameworks. Aspiring to be

vivid, pulsating, ephemeral, sense- and the atmosphere-oriented, architecture ventures

into the areas beyond the boundaries of self-centrism. The new, informal methodology of

Received October 26, 2015 / Accepted November 23, 2015 Corresponding author: Ana Vignjevic, * PhD candidate

Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Niš, 18000 Niš, Aleksandra Medvedeva 14, Serbia

E-mail: [email protected]

246 A. VIGNJEVIC

architectural design is mostly directed to the current ecological and landscape discourse,

which can be, except in the context of a technological and physical appearance, accepted

as an aesthetic, symbolic and perceptive category, or ultimately, as a general state of

mind. In such a shift of architectural position, the landscape becomes a sort of conceptual

aggregate from which architecture draws countless possibilities for self-transcendence.

A tendency of dissolving traditional distinction between architecture and landscape

has been known since the period of modernism. Even though the concept of transparency

and free flowing space liberated architecture from the ballast of structure and facade

massive wall, it has remained essentially unfinished and contradictory. In functionality of

modern age, which was based on stable objects and literal transparency, in the daylight,

the eye of the observer was able to penetrate easily and simply through the glassy

membrane into the form. The vagueness of the present electronic age melts the matter,

but also hinders the efforts to direct the view and „seize‟ the moment.

According to Salazar and Gausa (2002), there is a “progressive shift from a fixation on

objects to an assimilation of the context”. The age of technological acceleration requires a

new vision from the observer, as a different relation between natural and artificial. As

Milenkovic (2009) notes, it is necessary to create an transformable architectural concept

which is “fundamentally ambivalent as much as realization of chosen technique allows, in

order to establish a relationship analogous to the simultaneous manifestation of 'abundance'

and 'asceticism' in the fields of 'emotional experience' and 'refined rationalism'”.

Considering a shift of observation in such an ambivalent reality, this paper examines

new modes of spatial perception - with the implication of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology

of perception, as well as corresponding models of architectural materiality, based on the

design principles of two current authors - Kengo Kuma and Jean Nouvel.

2. SUBJECT - ARCHITECTURE - LANDSCAPE

The Western visual tradition, founded on the principles of linear perspective and the

Cartesian theory of vision, interpreted the landscape as an exclusively visual construct

and an object of contemplation (Ignold, 1993). That concept was based on the hierarchical

separation of subject and object and on a perception that excluded time as one of its

components. At such a secluded moment of gaze, a perceiver has no ability to entirely see,

comprehend and collect the meanings from the landscape. One can anticipate that logic of

perception in Rene Magritte's principles of landscape painting which is based on a pure

representation of the external world.1 (Fig. 1)

Hefele (2010) makes a comparison between Cosgrove's “landscape as a way of

seeing” (Cosgrove, 1998) with Ignold's opposite position which introduces landscape as a

form of “dwelling in the world” (Ignold, 2000). In this regard he sets two different

definitions of landscape meaning. The first position refers to the “social and cultural

product composed by projecting meaning onto the land” (Hefele, 2010), while the other

represents “practice and participation with the environment to create meaning” (Hefele,

1 Rene Magritte writes: “In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly

that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting, and outside in the landscape. This is

how we see the world. We see it outside of ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it

in ourselves.” loc. cit. in: Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi (2002)

Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the Ambivalence of Material Experience 247

2010). In the second, more important viewpoint for us, “meaning is there to be

discovered in the landscape, if only we know how to attend to it” (Ingold, 2000).

Fig. 1 Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933.2

Berleant (1991) holds a similar position, suggesting the concept of “participatory

landscape”, based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. For

Merleau-Ponty (2012), a true image is not the one which credibly, and according to

perspective rules, shows what we see through a static monocular view, but something that

follows the logic of embodied vision, bodily movements and binocular view. The

embodied eye allows reversibility with objects towards which it is directed. Referring to

Paul Klee‟s experience of landscape, in which “trees are looking at him”3, Marleu-Ponty

(Merleau-Ponty, 1964) transforms previous idea of fixed monocularity. Thus perception

turns into a 'binocular vision' and the subject into a synaesthetic entity of body and world

in which “the world turns back upon itself, becomes a „visible seer‟” (Smith, 1993).

The external world as a visible reality does not exists but for the moving eye of an

observer which makes the reality of landscape visible in a more accurate way than a

photograph. Marleu-Ponty's immediacy of landscape perception is also recognized in his

favouring of Cezanne's painting, in which he “depicts matter as it takes on form” (Merleau-

Ponty, 1964a). Thereby nature is revealed in all its innocent purity through the eyes of a

painter who “only is entitled to look to anything without being obliged to appraise to what

he sees” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). In the mediation between subject and landscape,

contemporary architecture, like a Cezanne's painting, tends to melt its formal appearance

giving way to materiality – by which the object is arising and disappearing at the same time.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(painting) 3 Paul Klee wrote: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days

I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me… I think that the painter must be penetrated by the

universe and not want to penetrate it”.

248 A. VIGNJEVIC

3. PERIPHERAL VISION

In line with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, architect Pallasmaa

develops his own theoretical direction founded in multisensory experience, as well as on

affirmation of fragile, peripheral and atmospheric vision. (Pallasmaa, 2014) Instead of

attending to a one-dimensional, image-based approach to architecture, Pallasmaa suggests

attention to peripheral vision, which goes beyond the object to perceive it contextually. He

emphasizes that the essential integration of architecture and landscape could be achieved

primarily by liberating the beholder from a cinematic and photographic perception of space.

According to him, an essential line in the evolution of contemporaneity has been the

liberation of the eye from the Cartesian perspectival epistemology, toward the unconscious,

peripheral vision. A focused - perspectival eye excludes us from the space and turns us into

isolated, passive viewers. By criticizing the usual architects‟ concern for the photogenic

quality of their works, Pallasmaa points out the necessity of leaving the photographic

approach to design in order to avoid the perception of architecture through series of “isolated,

framed and focused fragments” (Ibid.). As he explains, “the peripheral-atmospheric

perception is our essential reality, although we believe that we perceive everything with

precision“ (Ibid.). Thus the architectural space is interpreted through an undirected look, a

drift from visible, and the ambiguity becomes the only clear determination in the domain of

immeasurable parameters.

The similar phenomenological platform is established by the architects Kengo Kuma

and Jean Nouvel. By criticizing also the photographic and focused perception of space,

Kuma elaborates the notion of “wandering perception” (Kuma, 2010), while Nouvel writes

about its “destabililization“ (Nouvel, 2002). Drawing on the idea of perceptual versatility,

Kuma's and Nouvel's approaches to design process could be subsumed under two seemingly

different theoretical models: the model of the Garden – as an example of stimulation of haptic

experience, and the Cloud – as an expression of unconscious, imaginary experience.

4. GARDEN: KENGO KUMA'S HAPTIC EXPERIENCE

As an example of the place where peripheral vision and multisensory experience are

stimulated, Kuma (2005), as well as Pallasmaa (2005, 2000), refers to the forest and the

traditional Japanese garden.4 A philosopher Bachelard shares a similar attitude. In a

discourse of his poetic imagination, forest/garden character of space is reflected in its

ambivalent nature. Such space is closed/open, and at the same time “veiled for our eyes, but

transparent to action” (Bachelard, 1994).

As a response to the elusive web of information by which the contemporary electronic

context is constituted, Kuma suggests an architectural concept which contains “unprocessed

cluster of particles – scattered rubble and grass” (Kuma, 2010). That should be, as the wild

garden, a non-hierarchical space that has neither borders nor contours, no defined layout

or fixed paths, but where every subject is connected to the world as a whole. Such space

should provide the possibility for creating numerous new spaces and network of relationships

as soon as someone steps into it. (Fig. 2)

4 For the analogy with forest see: Pallasmaa (2005), and for the analogy with traditional Japanese garden see:

Pallasmaa (2000)

Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the Ambivalence of Material Experience 249

Fig. 2 Kengo Kuma, Instalation, Senseware:

Con/Fiber, Design Week, Milano, Italy, 2009.5

Kuma illustrates the conceptual model of such space using the metaphor of traditional

Japanese garden in his essay “Digital gardening“ (Kuma, 2005). The comparison between

landscape and architecture is not based on visual analogies, but on hidden programmatic

and methodological mechanisms of adapting the pastoral and handicraft techniques of

gardening to the contemporary technological processes. In distinction from a landscape

architect who works outside landscape and visually manipulates with it, a gardener is

always inside the space he cultivates. Busy with earthing up, watering and planting, a

gardener becomes the prisoner of space he works in. However, he is inside the space in a

different way from the visitor of an object which is typical for the Western architectural

praxis. The images he looks at are not distant and framed, but rather intimate and

compassionate. Thus the psychological inertia of optical fields, which is limited by the

mechanisms of selectivity and gathering of experience, is surpassed, and the object-

oriented architectural image is replaced by a constantly changeable, interactive content.

Through such action every formal appearance of architecture disappears and turns into a

programmatic, incessantly changeable capacity of a place.

Kuma founds his theory on the polemic against Le Corbusier's architectural principles.

In Kuma's interpretation, Le Corbusier did not succeed in erasing the border between

architecture and surroundings, no matter how weak and dematerialized that border was. The

reason for that lies in his distinctively visual orientation and a desire to define the object as

a series of framed images: “The more we insist on visual perception, our view demands a

frame, and the frame inevitably turns into an object”. (Kuma, 2005)

According to Kuma, exceeding the boundaries of architectural object implies the

simultaneity of time-space perception. In that sense, the question of frame is not only in

the visual limitation of our eyesight, but in temporal isolation i.e. a moment when the

perception of frame secludes us from the time continuity: “As long as the subject depends

on its visual perception, it is isolated, no matter what it perceives and at what extent it

abides within architecture. The frame separates and pushes apart subject and object. Time

stops the moment our look directs towards a thing”. (Kuma, 2005). Dematerialization of

the formal architectural frame, in Kuma‟s opinion, lies in the redirecting the course of

action, as well as in the acceleration of time flow within architectural space. In such a

concept, perceiving of an object from an external, bird‟s-eye view becomes irrelevant. It

is necessary to experience the space from within, through the dynamics of changing the

5 http://www.architonic.com/ntsht/milano-2009/7000309

250 A. VIGNJEVIC

time sequences. In that way, the subordination of external form to inner mechanisms

creates prerequisites for the matter to 'flow quietly away' from the object and get into a

region where architecture becomes landscape and vice versa. (Kuma, 2010)

4.1. Event matters: fragmentation

In the process of interpreting the theoretical

platform of 'Digital Garden' within the domain of

architecture, Kuma chose the concept of

affirmation of architectural materials, as a sort of

mediators between a human body-architecture-

environment-time. In order for a subject to avoid

distancing himself, even for a moment, from the

visual field that surrounds him, Kuma creates a

principle in which the language of body and the

language of walls are complementary. Such a

concept implies the absence of windows on the

facade walls. (Fig. 3)

The traditional treatment of windows,

whether it is a group of openings or a glass

envelope, Kuma replaces with the concept of

“particlisation” (Ibid.), both at the level of urban

theory as well as at the level of the materials. By

particlising materials, the architectural space is no longer observed as a visually measurable

object, but as an interactive place in which the rhythm and the distance between fragmented

pieces are not perceived by eyesight, but through the action of human body. The size of the

selected particles is determined in response to the distance from the observer. In accordance

with this, it is possible to create the required articulation of time. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4 Kengo Kuma & Associates, Great Bamboo Wall House, Beijing, China, 2002.7

Following Deleuze‟s attitude to the elasticity of materials, Kuma establishes the thesis

of material “relativity” (Kuma, 2005a), based on the strong relationship between the body

and architectural materiality. According to Deleuze, the property of the material is no

more than an expressions of the speed and forces acting on it. For instance, when a ship

6 http://info.aia.org/blast_images/kc/cod_11_japan1.html 7 http://themodernhouseblog.net/2013/04/11/what-were-reading-kengo-kuma-complete-works/

Fig. 3 Kengo Kuma & Associates,

GC Prostho Museum

Research Center, Kasugai-shi,

Japan, 2010.6

Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the Ambivalence of Material Experience 251

moves at a certain speed, waves will change their primary state and become solid as a

stone. The metaphor of elasticity is in this case “the reflection of the active compression

of materials” and finally, referring to Deleuze, Kuma emphasizes that “all elasticity is

relative”. (Ibid.)

Fragmented, folded, narrowed, materials as stone, brick or wood, enable the light and

the sound to penetrate smoothly into the interior of an object, leaving the impression of a

vibrating and light structure of the wall. The technique of fragmentation is a process

based on the principle of permeation of „archetype pairs‟: light and shadow, opacity and

transparency, ephemeral and permanent, superficial and deep, singular and multiplied,

repetition and variation … Finally, every mentioned relation is woven into the

relationship between the smallest part and the whole. By merging the full (touchable) and

empty (untouchable) part of a materialized surface, the tactile and the visual value of

architecture permeate. As Vasilski (2012) observed, united tactile and transformational

value of the materials create the opportunity

of material expression of immateriality.

On the other hand, architectural form is

disintegrated in the interrupted continuity of

materials and turned into an open process, a

place of mediation. The integration of

architecture and landscape is in this way

realized not so much by the act of imitating the

exterior as by the technique of disappearance

of the form through the effect of destabilizing

its interior. Architectural form in fact implodes

dissolving its own interiority for the landscape

which surrounds it. (Fig. 5)

5. CLOUD: JEAN NOUVEL'S IMAGINARY EXPERIENCE

In the chapter on modern landscape painting at the end of the 19th century, John Ruskin

wrote: “We turn our eyes… to the most characteristic examples of modern landscape. Аnd, I believe, the first thing that will strike us, or that ought to strike us, is their cloudiness” (Ruskin, 1888). A century later, a cloud – as the manifestation of landscape atmosphere is acknowledged as one of the „first visual metaphor‟ in contemporary architectural discourse. Blurring the boundaries between real and virtual, material and immaterial, natural and artificial, creates preconditions for an architectural phenomenology which reveals itself through elusive form and suggestive indeterminacy.

Unlike the correlation between the former pure modernistic form and the ideal landscape image personified in the sun-space-greenery unity

9, the contemporary ambivalence of form

and architecture is opened for new, equally ambivalent forms of atmospheric activities. Blurring

10 as one of the manifestations of atmosphere's ephemerality, becomes the method

8 http://cplusc.com.au/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/LotusHouse.jpg 9 One of Le Corbusier‟s principles for “Ville Radieuse” (The Radiant City) from 1924. 10 Blur/ blurring can be seen as one of methodological and appearance phenomenon of contemporary architecture. Diller and Scofidio (2002) use this term in the title of their publication „Blur: the making of nothing‟, which follows the chronology of creating the pavilion of the same name (Blur building) from Expo in Switzerland in 2002. Diller

Fig. 5 Kengo Kuma & Associates, Lotus

House, Kamakura, Japan, 2005.8

252 A. VIGNJEVIC

and the final effect of architectural appearance. In that way, in accordance with the perception of landscape, architecture turns into an immeasurable and open process of adjustment, in which the clarity of one experience is expressed only within the field of subject‟s perception.

Similar to the viewer of landscape painting in Ruskin‟s time, the subject who participates in the perception of contemporary architecture is expected “to lay the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect the utmost satisfaction and instruction from what is impossible to arrest, and difficult to comprehend” (Ruskin, 1888). This is possible when a viewer is not able to see clearly, but partially, peripherally, dimly. The architecture of a cloud is an image seen by peripheral eyesight, from a distance, or through the window of a moving vehicle, or in any circumstances obstructing the careful observance of its specificities. Blurred appearance affirms that we always stand at the wrong place, from which it is impossible to comprehend the objective appearance of form.

The cloud displaces a viewer‟s position through the aesthetic of an uncertain and pure effect, while the vagueness of picture requires the perception be completed in the subject‟s imagination. Like Merleau-Ponty‟s visible seer, blurring „makes you look back‟ to the seer, whereas the perception becomes the question of mutual interaction between subject and object. In that sense, the perception of cloud can be defined not as looking at, but as a self-reflecting experience. Such a method undermines the independent existence of the exterior and re-defines it as a purely mental construction. Consequently, the architecture of a cloud is a space of production, an instrument, an artificial substructure based on the principles of nature while anticipating a subject‟s subsequent reaction.

Under such perception model, the architect Jean Nouvel creates his own authorial concept, found on the aesthetic of illusion and imagination. Unlike Kuma‟s and Pallasmaa‟s approaches which are based on the affirmation of the tactile value of concrete materials, Nouvel chose the concept of dematerialization, which implies the complete disappearance of the material aspect. The instrument for achieving such a concept does not lie in Kuma‟s activating of the object's interiority - based on bodily movements, but in the inclusion of the exterior – atmospheric activities into the process of dissolution of architectural appearance (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6 Ateliers Jean Nouvel, European Patent Office Competition,

Rijswijk, Netherlands, 2013.11

and Scofidio (2002) explane this phenomenon as a game between natural and technological forcesin which physical reality slowly vanishes and finally disappears at the expense of our physical effort in orientation. -The same term, but in a different context, is bound to the architecture of Eisenman (2007). In that case, the blur is not the question of visual effect, but a strategy for examinig the realtionship between mind and body in

architecture by which the conventional or expected experience of space is replaced. 11 http://www.sa-c.net/index.php/component/k2/item/104-svjetlo-u-arhitekturi.html

Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the Ambivalence of Material Experience 253

As Leatherbarrow (2009) observed, such

approach is analogue to Virilio‟s interpretation

of modernity, according to which “speed and

technology eliminate barriers between people

and nature, between the world and the

universe”. By the negation of the essential

difference between synthetic and natural

world, the rift between architecture and

landscape is levelled, as well as liberated from

the presence of material appearance. In the

absence of the material, the presence of

surroundings is achieved. The use of big

translucent or glass façades does not aim at an

easy and simple observance of visible

landscape (which was characteristic for the modern era), nor it is a goal per se. It rather

enables the surrounding atmospheric effects to “saturize”13

the architectural envelope by

tactics in the level of transparency, translucency or reflection, and thus become the

constituent element of object‟s structure itself. (Fig. 7)

In the case of the Cartier Foundation building, a viewer never knows whether he sees the

sky or its reflection. In fact, both are visible. The overlap of glass panels results in a

uniqueness of effects through the interaction of several different appearances. According to

Nouvel, the ambiguity between the real and the reflected picture, reality and illusion,

generates a form of sensory deception, formerly mentioned in this text as a “destabilization

of perception”. The language of reflection brings confusion into the field of perception,

relativizes reality and creates dynamic and complex images as opposed to a static and

obvious transparency.

5.1 Atmosphere matters: saturation

Since every atmosphere is “generated by a strong presence of materiality“ (Pallasmaa,

2014), thus the architecture of cloud can be understood as the act of weakening the formal

architectural logic at the expense of its materiality (Ibid.). The materialization of

atmosphere Nouvel creates by new, ambivalent form of transparency. The secret of his

transparency surpasses the imposed transparency, tactics between the visible and

invisible stands opposite to total visibility. Such technique of dematerialization is not

based on the modernistic utopia of a world without walls, but on a new kind of opening,

by using the walls that have already been built. According to Nouvel (2002), new

transparency is “trans-appearance”. The prefix trans- in this case can be understood as

the changeability of appearance through the regulation of attraction. (Fig. 8, 9)

12 http://www.sa-c.net/index.php/component/k2/item/104-svjetlo-u-arhitekturi.html 13 For the comparison between the concept of “sedimentation”, which is characteristic for the use of concrete

materials in architecture, and “saturation”, which is connected to Nouvel‟s dematerialized architecture, see:

Leatherbarrow (2009)

Fig. 7 Jean Nouvel, Arab World Institute,

Paris, France, 1989.12

254 A. VIGNJEVIC

Fig. 8,9 Jean Nouvel, Foundation Cartier, Paris, France, 1994.14

On the other hand, referring to Oscar Wilde‟s observation that “there was no fog in

London until Whistler started painting it” (Botton, 2006), the new transparency can be

interpreted as the trans-position of exterior reality from the natural to the artificial space

of image. In such conception of transpositioning, the metaphysical value of a landscape

effect turns into a pure aesthetic construction. In the discourse of architecture, such

inversion of the origin of landscape scenery can be realized within the relation between

surroundings and the façade. The surfaced, abstract and passive appearance of glass

envelope is contrary to vivid, stratified, mobile landscape. Unlike Kuma‟s concrete

materiality, such approach to materialization is free from the weight inherent in “material

essence or age” (Pallasmaa, 1994). Abandoning the obvious intimacy with the matter,

opens the architectural façade to numerous reflections of the exterior. In that way,

negation of plasticity could be interpreted as a sort of affirmative resistance, freezing of

the desired effect, taken from the surrounding. Thus the weightless architectural

appearance is allowed to imitate, as well as to revitalize the chosen character of a place.

6. CONCLUSION

Two seemingly opposite approaches to the dematerialization of boundary between

architecture and landscape, are bound by a common, paradoxical quality of materials

based on the inversion of the archetypical comprehension of their use. On one hand,

Kengo Kuma's fragmentation of solid materials such as stone or wood, enables the light

and the sound to penetrate smoothly into the interior of the form. Contrary to the essential

purpose and intent of such materials, they create the impression of a vibrating and light

structure of a wall.

In a broader sense, such „relativity of materialization‟ can also be interpreted as the

consequence of ambivalent and paradoxical relation to the perception of weight. The

notion of weight, in a contemporary context, is not necessarily connected to the inertia of

physical matter. Nowadays, when we can cut the hardest stone into a thin paper, the range

of contemporary significance of weight is much more polyvalent than in the architecture

of the past.

14 http://www.flickriver.com/photos/atelier_flir/sets/72157601438298922/

http://www.jeannouvel.com/mobile/en/tablette/#/mobile/en/tablette/projet/paris-france-cartier-foundation1

Architecture as Landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the Ambivalence of Material Experience 255

On the other hand, the lightness of the glass panel in Nouvel‟s architecture, contrary

to its basic purpose, makes it difficult for a view to penetrate through it. The use of

reflection or the layering of glass (previously conditioned by its thinning) is perceived as

a solid mass and gives the impression of constantly changeable visual appearance. Thus

the contemporary, ambivalent quality of transparency is revealed. Unlike the previous,

total continuity between the interior and the exterior, typical for the architecture of Mies

van der Rohe, this concept turns dematerialized glass membrane into an active in-

between space, by which the consciousness of interior and exterior is stimulated.

In Kuma‟s palpability of materials, in their full concreteness, we recognize the “tactile

value” (Pallasmaa, 2000) as the primordial archetype of mediation between the interior

and the exterior. On the other hand, Nouvel 's lightweight glass surfaces, as a method of

denying the obvious intimacy with the materiality and its heaviness, does not imply the

absence of an inner, hidden touch. That sort of immaterial tactility, which is no less than

the physical one, was described yet by Le Corbusier (1964): “I have always had the

weight of stone and bricks in my arms, the astonishing resistance of wood in my eyes, the

miraculous properties of steel in my mind”. Therefore, even in a desire to see, so

characteristic for the Western visual tradition, architecture in its essence is always

inevitably tactile.

The fragmentation of traditionally solid materials and opposite to that, the layering of

glass offer a new and common degree of intimacy. In such game of disclosure, material

“pretends to deny what it has to show, at the same time as pretending to show what it

denies” (Steinmann, 1994) In both cases, the task of architect is to predict what should be

visible or invisible.

By the transformation of archetypical role of applied materials, architecture itself

steps into the field of its own contradictions. Yearning to be merged with natural

surroundings, it actually displaces materials from their natural context (truth to

materials), which implies “selection and application according to the laws conditioned by

nature” (Semper, 1989). In this way, similar to materials themselves, architecture is

constantly relativized within the framework of the proposed method and it creates its

appearance on a pulsing line between the steady laws of its own necessity, and the

changeable, meta-architectural poetry of space.

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ARHITEKTURA KAO PEJZAŽ: KENGO KUMA, ŽAN NUVEL

I AMBIVALENTNOST MATERIJALNOG ISKUSTVA

Ovaj rad ispituje savremen koncepcijski, perceptivni i estetski potencijal arhitekture da se

posredstvom materijalizacije transformiše u pejzaž. Za razliku od nekadašnjeg, modernističkog

načela transparentnosti, kojim se na bukvalnom, vizuelnom nivou ukidao zid između unutrašnjeg i

spoljašnjeg prostora, savremen vizuelni kontekst otvara uslove za uspostavljanje novog, ambivalentnog

tretmana (de)materijalizacije granice između arhitekture i pejzaža. Ovakva transformacija, u radu je

tumačena kao posledica opšte promene vezane za pitanje determinisanosti arhitektonske forme, kao i

promene iz oblasti teorije percepcije. Ambivalentan odnos na liniji subjekt-arhitektura-pejzaž, u radu

se oslanja na fenomenologiju percepcije Moris Merlo Pontija (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) i Juhani

Palasme (Juhani Pallasmaa), dok je arhitektonska konkretizacija date relacije istražena na primeru

dva različita autorska pristupa - Kenga Kume (Kengo Kuma) i Žana Nuvela (Jean Nouvel). Akcenat

na arhitektonskom iskustvu, pre nego na arhitektonskoj slici, postavlja materijale u domen glavne

okosnice ovakvog koncepta, bilo da se radi o njihovoj taktilnoj (Kuma) ili imaginarnoj vrednosti

(Nuvel). Konačno, u potrebi da arhitektonska materijalnost postane deo prirodnog okruženja, oba

projektantska metoda paradoksalno izmeštaju materijale iz njihovog prirodnog konteksta (truth to

materials), čime se, posledično, osim materijalnosti, relativizuje i perceptivni doživljaj samog mesta.

Ključne reči: arhitektura, pejzaž, Kengo Kuma, Žan Nuvel, materijalnost, ambivalentnost